AM report for Thibaut Paumard
I recommend to accept Thibaut Paumard as a Debian Developer.
1. Identification & Account Data
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First name: Thibaut
Last name: Paumard
Key fingerprint: BCAD FB52 B419 98D7 4D99 D98E 9394 5348 E0DC 2840
Account: thibaut
2. Background
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Applicant writes:
I came to GNU/Linux in 1998 while I was a student. I first bought SuSE
CDs at a local retailer's and stayed with this set-up for some time, but
I got tired of the package management and configurations systems. At
some point near 2003 I decided to try out the Debian thingy all the
geeks around were peeping about and I was really amazed by the
reliability of the system which would almost always react as I expected,
barely ever becoming unbootable after an upgrade (yes, that happened
when playing with testing).
I soon felt the urge to participate in free software, but had yet no
idea how to, although I did write a small PHP library called Zouzou to
do basic web content management and which is still available on the web
under GPL: http://thibaut.paumard.free.fr/zouzou/. This PHP library was
used for the website of a local group of a famous non-governmental
organisation. It's completely superseded by better software by know (and
it was, perhaps, already at that time).
In the meantime, I was also spending most of my day-time coding on a
little known interpreter, Yorick, which I found was a perfect match for
my research needs. In 2006, Debian package for Yorick was orphaned due
to the previous maintainer's key lapsing. He was happy letting me adopt
the package, and that's what I did. I got involved in the Yorick
community, reporting and sometimes solving bugs there. I also started
making Debian packages for Yorick add-ons and plug-ins. I made a couple
of scripts (dh_installyorick and update-yorickdoc) to help myself in
packaging such add-ons. Last time I counted, I was maintaining 16 source
packages for Yorick add-ons (some of them building multiple binary
packages). In total, Yorick and it's add-ons counts 17 source packages
and 28 binary packages. Although fairly specialized, I know these
packages are used on a day-to-day basis by professionals and are ran on
computing clusters. Yorick is particularly popular in the French
astronomy community. Close colleagues told me they are quite happy with
these packages.
In addition, I packaged a small utility which seems to be fairly widely
used: zerofree, which allows punching holes in disk images used with
virtualisation software such as virtualbox, and adopted gimp-gap some
time ago.
In my professional life, I'm the (co)author of some bits of free
software, most notably GYOTO, a general relativistic ray-tracing code
which I RFSed a couple of months ago:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=640809
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=669016
GYOTO has been conceived as packageable and reusable free software from
the ground up. As a library, it could be used for science or educational
software as well are in games or other areas needing to model
gravitational physics in the relativistic regime. Of course, the runtime
utilities are already used in scientific papers. As an uploading DD, I
will almost certainly upload this piece of software soon enough.
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